Updated: How Software Vendor Infoland Scales Customer Support With a Community

Six months ago Infoland launched their own customer community which serves as the central hub for interaction with customers, helping to scale customer service and support the company's growth ambitions. We're here with an update on the impact it's already had for Community Manager Hiewwaiy Kwok and CMO René de Jong.

The Infoland community was festively announced at their annual customer event, hosting about 400 customers.

A bit of background: what does Infoland offer to its customers?

Hiewwaiy: "At Infoland we create quality management software that allows users to work smarter, more efficient and safer. Infolands software is universal and applicable for all sectors and can be personalized with a custom workflow and forms. Daily about 300,000 people use our software across 500 organizations."

Why did you start an online community for your customers?

Hiewwaiy: "We use to have different channels for communication, which made it difficult for our users to get the information they need. We were looking to create one central hub for communication, allowing our users to easily find all information and updates about our software. Besides, we wanted to increase a sense of community by connecting our users with each other and with Infoland, enabling them to share knowledge."

René: "We value our users’ ideas and feedback a lot. For example, we like to test developments with our users as much as possible. Whether it is about gathering our users’ ideas or getting their feedback, the community is the most important channel to get in touch with our users."

What role does the community play in your company growth?

René: "In 2030 we want to have 15 million end users across the globe, so one of our biggest challenges is to become scalable. With multiplying customers we don’t want to multiply the service staff. With the community we want to empower our users to share knowledge and get answers to their questions through self-service."

Hiewwaiy: "The community plays an essential role in our customer service approach. It helps our customers to get answers quickly and enables them to make better use of our software. There is a lot of user generated content, which is good for SEO and building our knowledge base. We like to integrate our community content into Zendesk (our support ticketing system) and into our own software by replacing the ‘help’ function which currently requires a lot of maintenance."

Does the community live up to your expectations?

Hiewwaiy: "We are very happy with our flying start. There is a lot of activity and we already have a handful of super users. What we would like to improve is that we start measuring more and motivate our customers to proactively share knowledge."

René: "We see a sustained growth in activity and members and internal adoption is very high. Not only by the community manager, but also by diverse departments and people. The system invites people to share knowledge and get into conversations with customers. We don’t see this very often. Weekly we meet to discuss moderation and issues and decide what content we are going to write."

What did you look for in a solution?

Hiewwaiy: "We were looking for a fast implementation and a sustainable partnership. In the process inSided helped us by looking at the problems we wanted to solve and showed us how we could embed the community into the organization. To us, this felt very trusted. Furthermore, we find it important that we could align on the vision on communities with our new vendor."

René: "We have a lot of respect for the speed of implementation, this is very unique and worth to mention. We’ve set a lot of pressure on time and it’s admirable how we realized this as a team."

When is the community successful?

René: "We will look into quantitative KPIs like the effect on the number of calls to our service desk, NPS scores, and the number of members. But also at qualitative KPIs like reaching every user so we can reach our mission of making everyone work smarter, more efficient and safer."

Hiewwaiy: "We want to maintain our low level of churn and expect the community to play an important role in this. Also, the community is a big driver for our people to continuously think ‘How do I keep in touch with our end users and how do I keep sharing knowledge?’ The platform facilitates this very strongly."

Results

Just 6 months after go-live, Infoland is already seeing these benefits:

Increased engagement with their users.Almost50% of Infoland’susers have signed up to join the customer community. These users nowanswer 40%of all new questions that other users ask. And people work together: on average, five users participate in discussions, providing additional details to the question, or helping to formulate the right answer.

Extended the knowledge base with the help of their users.In the past half year, Infoland users have created149 new topicsin the knowledge base. This is in addition tothe 208 topicsproduced by the company’s support and product team.

Shifted preferred channel of support from support desk towards self-service.When Infoland recently surveyed its customers, they saw that only 38% of customersprefer to get their answer via the service desk, with the preference for online self-servicerising to 31% (of which 15% is from the existing knowledge base and 16% from the newly launched community. This shift towards users opting for self-service is expected to continue, and Infoland has done a great job of setting their support function up for the future.

Hiewwaiy: "We were already known for our high quality support, and that is something we want to keep providing, even with the high growth that we are experiencing now. With inSided, our customers can get excellent self-service with the help of their peers. This enables our support team to focus on the more complex requests and create new valuable content. Our efficiency and effectiveness increased significantly!"

These first results are a clear indicator that this new channel is a good fit for Infoland users and that the platform triggers community engagement in a positive way. Click here to read the full case study.

This blog post was originally posted by Remco de Vries on August 30, 2018. It was updated by Danielle Juson on March 11, 2019.